Among the pupils of Rabanus Maurus was a boy afflicted with strabismus. He was cross-eyed, or crooked-eyed in some manner, and this fixed upon him the name of Strabo the “squinter.” Like many another monk in that age, he has so sunk himself into his service as to have become a man without a country and almost without parentage. Some therefore contend that he was an Anglo-Saxon, once a monk in London and afterward educated at St. Gall, Reichenau, and Fulda. An obscure tradition even makes him a relative of the Venerable Bede. Another story assigns him to Haymo’s family. Now, Haymo was a monk of Fulda about 850, a man of very liberal opinions, learned, and truly catholic, especially in his denial of the universal authority of the Pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation. It is something of an honor to have been this man’s brother, and it is no discredit to have been related to Bede. At any rate these guesses—for they are little else—serve to show us the repute in which Walafrid Strabo was held.
More accurate investigation reveals a sentence in the preface to the life of St. Gall which seems conclusive. In it Walafrid speaks of “us Germans or Suabians.” Suabia is thus designated as his birthplace, and we find his name among the list of those scholars who did credit to their teacher Rabanus.
His period is the middle of the ninth century, for in 842 he became Abbot of Reichenau in the diocese of Constance, and he died in 849. Dates like these are not hard to verify, for we have many chronicles and records in which the Dark Ages laid the foundations of authentic history. Here lie away in their narrow niches of brief reference many illustrious people. And the work of the hymnologist consists often enough in the same sort of research as secular history demands. Now and then on the dead breast there is a little withered flower ready to crumble into dust.
That curious, peering Trithemius—to whom we are indebted for such laborious inquiries concerning the men of this time—maintains that Walafrid was “rector” of the school in the monastery of Hirschfeld. If this be so it only confirms what we note again and again, that Alcuin and Rabanus were the real instigators of German scholarship. And the work from which we shall presently quote becomes more interesting to us for this reason.
Walafrid left a long catalogue of works behind him. He wrote a valuable antiquarian treatise on the divine offices and usages of the Church. Besides, he is accredited as the author of the lives of St. Gall, St. Othmar, St. Blaithmac, St. Mamma, and St. Leudegaris. He also composed various poems; a preface to the Life of Ludwig the Pious, and a condensation of Rabanus Maurus’s Commentary on Leviticus. He compiled the famous Glossa Ordinaria, which remained the standard commentary on the Bible throughout the Middle Ages. He began the annals of Fulda, which have since been continued by competent hands, notably those of Christopher Brower. He has been called a “pretty good poet for his age”—by which is meant that there was a scanty supply of poetry in the ninth century—a fact which no one is competent to dispute.
It goes without saying that his life was the life of an ecclesiast, restricted to a Chinese minuteness of ritual, and permitting only such visits and journeys as religious business justified. His death occurred on one of these infrequent expeditions. It was in France, whither he had gone—as we are expressly told—in order to hasten some ecclesiastical affair.
These are the meagre and unentertaining facts connected with the name of Walafrid Strabo. He would not have deserved, nor would he have received our notice if two of his hymns (the Laudem beatae martyris and the Gloriam nato cecinere) had not been preserved. These entitle him to mention, and he promptly rises to genuine importance if we can agree with Kellner (see Bibliotheca Sacra, January, 1883, p. 154), that a recently discovered “diary” is from his pen. It is probable that, whether it be authentic or not, it is strictly accurate in its relation of the studies pursued in those schools. And if we assume it to be credible we can revise our dates to correspond.
Thus his school life began in 816, and after its close he went to Fulda, thence to return to his old monastery in 842 as its abbot. These dates are afforded by the document itself, which was originally published in 1857, as a part of the educational report of the Benedictine school of St. Maria of Einsiedeln in Switzerland. It appears to me that its tone and composition are not such as to justify the value which Kellner sets upon it. Walafrid’s name was a convenient one, and this is doubtless no more nor less than a clever historical romance. But it has been composed in the very neighborhood of the scenes it depicts, and the advantages of all the ancient MSS. and traditions have been incalculably great.
The narrative is introduced by a modern preface which speaks of St. Meinrad, the founder of Einsiedeln, as a contemporary of Walafrid. Then we have a statement which tersely exhibits the plan and purpose of the story:
“In the dark hour when the Roman imperial throne collapsed on which Theodoric the Goth had just seated his teacher Avitus, Manlius Boethius committed his spiritual wealth to the Goth Cassiodorus, who transmitted it to the sons of St. Benedict,” etc.